The Society for the Preservation of Racism

When Barack Obama asserted — in advance of a completed police investigation, let alone a jury trial or grand jury investigation — that he identified with young Trayvon Martin, the black teenager shot and killed in Florida, it was an extraordinarily reactionary moment with possible ramifications of interference with the justice system.

But it was not surprising.

Since obtaining the presidency, Barack Obama has led a Democratic Party that would be better called The Society for the Preservation of Racism.

The reason is evident. Increasingly, racism — and more generally, the division of our country into racial and ethnic interest groups — is all the Democrats have. The rest of liberal/leftist ideology is disintegrating all around them, as fragile and illusory as the welfare state itself.

Without racism — or more exactly the (SET ITAL) putative existence (END ITAL) of racism — the Democratic Party would be an association of overpaid trade union executives, unemployed Occupy movement sympathizers and trial lawyers. In other words — mighty small.

So no wonder Barack Obama rushes to judgment in a case for which none of us know the true details; a case, moreover, in which those details are so obscure and debatable that they may be ultimately unknowable, our opinions mere projections of our prejudices and beliefs.

Did the 6-foot-2 Martin sufficiently injure or threaten to injure George Zimmerman to justify a mortal response? Frankly, I don’t know, and suspect I never will know to any degree of certainty. I also will probably never know to what degree race had to do with it, if anything.

Nevertheless — tragic as it is and was for Trayvon Martin, his family and friends — the teenager’s death is an ultimately marginal event in a gigantic country, a one in 311 million shot, the furthest thing imaginable from an epidemic of any sort.

When this death was first publicized last week, Leon de Wintr made this clear when he published statistics in PJ Media indicating the numbers of white-on-black and black-on-white murders are minuscule in the U.S. In the years 1974 to 2004, “86 percent of white murders had white offenders, and 94 percent of black murders had black offenders.”

By 2009, according to Department of Justice statistics, the number of white murder victims had declined to 3,518, of whom 454 were killed by blacks (for whatever reason — who knows if they were racist?). Black victims were at 2,867, of whom 209 were killed by whites (again for whatever reason). By way of comparison, traffic deaths for the same year were 33,963. Obviously, you have much better chance of being killed by a Porsche than by a racist.

Still, Obama and the Democrats think we have a Big Race Problem. As an ex-civil rights worker (South Carolina, 1966), I cry !%$%& (That’s a word recently employed by presidential candidate Rick Santorum when addressing a reporter.)

Proof that we are no longer a racist country is everywhere. (Yes, I know racists still exist. So do pederasts and spousal abusers. They always will. But racists are a decreasing minority.) But no proof was more interesting and powerful than when the late Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to anyone who could give evidence even one person in the tea party was racist.

I don’t know how many people identify with the tea party, but given the recent election, it should run into the millions. Yet no one could come forth with a single verifiable racist — not even with the motivation of a hundred grand.

The truth is racists are pariahs in America, as they should be, more so probably than in any country in the world.

So why do Democrats and: soi-disant: liberal/progressives persist in calling us racist? Paramount, of course, is the political self-interest referred to above. But other reasons exist. In an earlier article, I wrote of a nostalgia for racism, a yearning for the halcyon days of the civil rights movement, when we all could feel righteous (or self-righteous) for battling the likes of Bull Connor or George Wallace.

Unfortunately, however, things have gotten nastier. What we see now is an attempt — conscious or unconscious — to generate racism by false accusation, literally to manufacture it.

This desperate behavior as racism diminishes is what we see in Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and, needless to say, Louis Farrakhan. But it is also visible buried not far below the surface of our president, the man who promised to be a post-racial president.

So most of us were therefore unsurprised when Obama injected himself almost instantly into the Martin-Zimmerman Affair. He just couldn’t resist, just as he couldn’t resist injecting himself when the Cambridge police had the most minor dust-up with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

Racism had to be preserved. It just couldn’t go away.

What is the solution to this endlessly depressing syndrome? Way back in 2005, the actor Morgan Freeman hit the nail on the proverbial head when being interviewed by “60 Minutes'” Mike Wallace. “Stop talking about it,” said Freeman to the astonished Wallace. “I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”

No truer words on the subject have ever been spoken. Too bad Freeman couldn’t adhere to them himself.

But the story isn’t entirely sad. Racists still are: pariahs, even if race baiters are everywhere. We should all remember that — and keeping mocking the race baiters until they go away. That, for good or ill, is our assignment. Whoever said it would be simple?